Submitted

Assemblyman
John Ceretto, R-C-I-Lewiston, who came out against the plan to give free
college tuition to convicts this week, is now circulating a petition against
the plan. The "Kids Before Cons" petition, which is being sponsored by the
entire Assembly Minority Conference, already has almost 4,000 signatures in
just a few days. The petition can be found at http://bit.ly/KidsB4Cons,as well as on
Ceretto's Facebook page, https://www.facebook.com/pages/John-D-Ceretto/.

"My
office has received a lot of calls and emails in opposition to the idea of
giving free college education to convicts. Together with my Assembly Minority
colleagues, we are organizing that opposition into one cohesive voice. We are
united in the belief that New York must put 'Kids Before Cons,' and help the
working-class families who go into serious debt to pay for college," Ceretto
said. "As a father whose kids have taken out loans and worked to put themselves
through college, I know that hard-working families deserve help before people
who have been incarcerated for breaking the law. I'm working with my Assembly
Minority colleagues to put a stop to this unfair plan. We need to focus on the
real problem that college education is now unaffordable for everybody."

Since the
plan to give convicts a free college education was announced, Ceretto has been
working to stop this plan from being passed by organizing opposition. Ceretto said
he believes a better use of this money would be to decrease the cost of college
overall. One avenue to accomplish this would be putting it toward increasing
funding for the Tuition Assistance Program for the first time since 2001.